Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life (2 page)

Side by side, they walked along the footpath and down the alley into Forest Road, not speaking, for there was nothing yet to say. The woman was dead, but death by murder is in a way not an end but a beginning. The lives of the naturally dead may be buried with them. Hers would now gradually be exposed, event after event, obscure though she had been, until it took on the character of a celebrity’s biography. From the alley, they turned to the right and stood outside the pair of houses, cottages really, in front of which Wexford had parked his car. The houses shared a single gable, and in its apex was a plaster plaque bearing their name and the date of their construction: Carlyle Villas, 1902. Wexford knocked at the blue front door with little hope of getting an answer. There was none, and no one came when they rang the bell on the neighbouring front door, a far more trendy and ambitious affair of wrought iron and reeded glass.

Frustrated at this most promising port of call, they crossed the street. Forest Road was a cul-de-sac, ending in a stone wall, behind which meadows swelled and the forest sprawled. It contained about a dozen houses, apart from Carlyle Villas, a clutch of tiny cottages at the wall end, two or three newer bungalows, a squat grey stone lodge that had once stood at the gates of a long-vanished mansion. One of the bungalows, built at the period when Hollywood’s influence penetrated even this corner of Sussex, had windows of curved glass and a roof of green pantiles. Bella Vista.

The child Nicky was still up, sitting with his mother in a living room that had the same sort of untidy look as the one Wexford had left an hour before. But if Parker hadn’t introduced this girl as his wife, Wexford would have taken her for no more than an adolescent. She had the smooth brow and bunchy cheeks of a child, the silken hair, the innocent eyes. She must have been married at sixteen, though she looked no more than that now.

Parker said with ferocious winks, ‘This gentleman’s a doctor, come to tell us the poor lady’s all right.’ Nicky buried his face in his mother’s shoulder.

‘Quite all right,’ Wexford lied. ‘She’ll be fine.’ They say the dead are well . . .

‘You get along to Nanna’s room then, Nicky, and she’ll let you watch her TV.’

The tension lightened on his departure. ‘Thanks,’ said Parker. ‘I only hope it isn’t going to have a bad effect on him, poor kid.’

‘Don’t worry. He’s too young to see newspapers, but you’ll have to exercise a bit of censorship when it comes to the TV. Now, Mr Parker, I think you said Miss - er - Comfrey’s father was in hospital. D’you know which hospital?’

‘Stowerton. The infirmary. He had an accident last - when would it have been, Stell?’

‘About May,’ said Stella Parker. ‘Miss Comfrey came down to see him, came in a taxi from the station, and when he saw her he rushed out of the house and fell over on the path and broke his hip. Just like that it happened. Her and the taxi-man, they took him to the hospital in the same taxi and he’s been there ever since. I never saw it. Mrs Crown told me. Miss Comfrey’s been down once to see him since. She never did come much, did she, Brian?’

‘Not more than once or twice a year,’ said Parker.

‘I knew she was coming yesterday. Mrs Crown told me. I saw her in the Post Office and she said Rhoda’d phoned to say she was coming on account of old Mr Comfrey’d had a stroke. But I never saw her, didn’t really know her to speak to.’

Burden said, ‘Who is Mrs Crown?’

‘Miss Comfrey’s auntie. She lives in the next house to old Mr Comfrey. She’s the one you want to see.’

‘No doubt, but there’s no one in.’

‘I tell you what,’ said Stella Parker who seemed to have twice her husband’s grasp and intelligence, ‘I don’t want to put myself forward, but I do read detective books, and if it’s sort of background stuff you want, you couldn’t do better than talk to Brian’s gran. She’s lived here all her life, she was born in one of those cottages.’

‘Your grandmother lives with you?’

‘Helped us buy this place with her savings,’ said Parker, ‘and moved in with us. It works OK, doesn’t it, Stell? She’s a wonder, my gran.’

Wexford smiled and got up. ‘I may want to talk to her but not tonight. You’ll be notified about the inquest, Mr Parker. It shouldn’t be too much of an ordeal. Now, d’you know when Mrs Crown will be home?’

‘When the pubs turn out,’ said Parker.

‘I think the infirmary next, Mike,’ said Wexford. ‘From the vague sort of time Crocker gave us, it’s beginning to look to me as if Rhoda Comfrey was killed on her way back from visiting her father in hospital. She’d have used that footpath as a short cut from the bus stop.’

‘Visiting time at Stowerton’s seven till eight in the evenings,’ said Burden. ‘We may be able to fix the time of death more accurately this way than by any post-mortem findings.’

‘The pub-orientated aunt should help us there. If this old boy’s compos mentis, we’ll get his daughter’s London address from him.’

‘We’ll also have to break the news,’ said Burden.

Departing visitors were queueing at the bus stop outside Stowerton Royal Infirmary. Had Rhoda Comfrey queued there on the previous night? It was ten past eight. A man in the porter’s lodge told them that James Albert Comfrey was a patient in Lytton Ward. They went along a corridor and up two flights of stairs. A pair of glass double doors, the entrance to Lytton Ward, were closed. As Wexford pushed them open, a young nurse of Malaysian or Thai origin popped up in their path and announced in a chirrup that they couldn’t come in now.

‘Police,’ said Burden. ‘We’d like to see the sister in charge.’

‘If you please, my dear,’ said Wexford, and the girl gave him a broad smile before hurrying off. ‘Do you have to be so bloody rude, Mike?’

She came back with Sister Lynch, a tall dark-haired Irishwoman in her late twenties. ‘What can I do for you gentlemen?’ She listened, clicked her tongue as Wexford gave her the bare details. ‘There’s a terrible thing. A woman’s not safe to walk abroad. And Miss Comfrey in here only last night to see her father.’

‘We’ll have to see him. Sister.’

‘Not tonight you won’t. Chief Inspector. I’m sure I’m sorry, but I couldn’t allow it, not with the old gentlemen all settling down for the night. They’d none of them get a wink of sleep, and it’s going off duty I am myself in ten minutes. I’ll tell him myself tomorrow, though whether it’ll sink in at all I doubt.’

‘He’s senile?’

‘There’s a word, Chief Inspector, that I’m never knowing the meaning of. Eighty-five he is, and he’s had a major stroke. Mostly he sleeps. If that’s to be senile, senile he is. You’ll be wasting your valuable time seeing him. I’ll break it to him as best I can. Now would there be anything else?’

‘Miss Comfrey’s home address, please.’

‘Certainly.’ Sister Lynch beckoned to a dark-skinned girl who had appeared, pushing a trolley of drugs. ‘Would you get Miss Comfrey’s home address from records, Nurse Mahmud?’

‘Did you talk to Miss Comfrey last night. Sister?’

‘No more than to say hallo and that the old gentleman was just the same. And I said good-bye to her too. She was talking to Mrs Wells and they left together. Mrs Wells’s husband is in the next bed to Mr Comfrey. Here’s the address you were wanting. Thank you, nurse. Number one, Carlyle Villas, Forest Road, Kingsmarkham.’ Sister Lynch studied the card which had been handed to her. ‘No phone I see.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve got Mr Comfrey’s address there,’ said Wexford. ‘It’s his daughter’s we want.’

‘But that is his daughter’s, his and his daughter’s.’

Wexford shook his head. ‘No. She lived in London.’

‘It’s the only one we have,’ said Sister Lynch, a slight edge to her voice. ‘As far as we know. Miss Comfrey lived in Kingsmarkham with her father.’

‘Then I’m afraid you were misled. Suppose you had had to get in touch with her - for instance, if her father had taken a turn for the worse - how would you have done so? Notified her by letter? Or sent a messenger.? 

Sister Lynch had begun to look huffy. He was questioning her efficiency. ‘That wouldn’t have been necessary. Miss Comfrey phoned in almost every day. Last Thursday, now, she phoned on the very day her father had his stroke.’

‘And yet you say she hadn’t a phone? Sister, I need that address. I shall have to see Mr Comfrey.’

Her eyes went to her watch and noted the time. She said very sharply, ‘Aren’t I telling you, the poor old gentleman’s no more than a vegetable at all? As for giving you an address, you’d as likely get an answer out of my little dog.’

‘Very well. In the absence of Miss Comfrey’s address, I’ll have Mrs Wells’s please.’ This was provided, and Wexford said. ‘We’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘You must suit yourselves. And now I’ll take my leave of you.’

Wexford murmured as they left, ‘There is nothing you could take from me that I would more willingly part withal,’ and then to Burden, who was smugly looking as if his early rudeness had been justified and he hoped his superior realized it, ‘We’ll get it from the aunt. Odd, though, isn’t it, her not giving her home address to the hospital?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Underhand, but not odd. These old people can be a terrible drag. And it’s always the women who are expected to look after them. I mean, old Comfrey’ll be let out some time and he won’t be able to live on his own any more. A single woman and a daughter is a gift to all those busybody doctors and social workers. They’d seize on her. Wouldn’t even consider expecting it of a son. If she gave them her real address they’d pounce on that as a convalescent home for the old boy.’

‘You’re the last person I thought I’d ever hear handing out Women’s Lib propaganda,’ said Wexford. ‘Wonders will never cease. But doesn’t it strike you that your theory only increases her chances of getting stuck with her father? They think she’s on the spot, they think she lives with him already.’

‘There’ll be an explanation. It isn’t important, is it?’

‘It’s a departure from the norm, and that makes it important to me. I think Mrs Wells next, Mike, and then back to Forest Road to wait for the aunt.'

Mrs Wells was seventy years old, slow of speech and rather confused. She had seen and spoken to Rhoda Comfrey twice before on her previous visits to the hospital, once in May and once in July. On the evening before they had got on the bus together outside the hospital at eight-fifteen. What had they talked about? Mrs Wells thought it had mostly been about her husband’s hip operation. Miss Comfrey hadn’t said much, had seemed a bit nervous and uneasy. Worried about her father, Mrs Wells thought. No, she didn’t know her London address, believed in fact that she lived in Forest Road where she had said she was returning. Mrs Wells had left the bus at the Kingsbrook Bridge, but her companion had remained on it, having a ticket to the next fare stage.

They returned to the police station. The weapon hadn’t been found, and the house-to-house inquiry made by Loring, Marwood and Gates had produced negative results. No one in the cottages or the bungalows had heard or seen anything untoward on the previous evening. The inhabitants of the single detached house were away on holiday, and nobody had been working on the allotments. Rhoda Comfrey had been slightly known to everyone the three men had questioned, but only one had seen her on the previous day, and that had been when she left her father’s house at six-twenty to catch the bus for Stowerton. Her London address was unknown to any of the residents of Forest Road.

‘I want you to get back there,’ Wexford said to Loring, ‘and wait for Mrs Crown. I’m going home for an hour to get a bite to eat. When she comes in, call me on my home number.’

Dora had been sewing, but the work had been laid aside, and he found her reading a novel. She got up immediately and brought him a bowl of soup, chicken salad, some fruit. He seldom talked about work at home, unless things got very tough. Home was a haven - Oh, what know they of harbours that sail not on the sea? - and he had fallen in love with and married the kind of woman who would give him one. But did she mind? Did she see herself as the one who waited and served while he lived? He had never thought much about it. Thinking of it now reawakened the anxiety that had laid dormant for the past three hours, pushed out of mind by greater urgencies.

‘Hear any more from Sylvia?’ he said.

‘Neil came round for the teddy bear. Ben wouldn’t go to sleep without it.’ She touched his arm, then rested her hand on his wrist. ‘You mustn’t worry about her. She’s grownup. She has to cope with her own problems.’

‘Your son’s your son,’ said her husband, ‘till he gets him a wife, but your daughter’s your daughter the whole of your life.’

‘There goes the phone.’ She sighed, but not rebelliously. ‘I have measured out my life in telephone bills.’

‘Don’t wait up for me,’ said Wexford.

It was dark now, ten minutes to eleven, the wide sky covered all over with stars. And the moonlight was strong enough to cast bold shadows of tree and gate and pillar box along the length of Forest Road. A single street lamp shone up by the stone wall, and lights were on all over 2, Carlyle Villas, though the other houses were in darkness. He rang the bell on the reeded glass and wrought-iron front door.

‘Mrs Crown?’

He had expected a negative answer because this woman was much younger than he had thought she would be. Only a few years older than he. But she said yes, she was, and asked him what he wanted. She smelt of gin and had about her the reckless air - no apparent fear of him or cautiousness or suspicion - that drink brings, though this might have been habitual with her. He told her who he was and she let him in. There, in a cluttered bizarre living room, he broke the news to her, speaking gently and considerately but all the time sensing that gentleness and consideration weren’t needed here.

‘Well, fancy,’ she said. ‘What a thing to happen! Rhoda, of all people. That’s given me a bit of a shock, that has. A drink is called for. Want one?’ Wexford shook his head. She helped herself from a gin bottle that stood on a limed oak sideboard whose surface was covered with drips and smears and ring marks. ‘I won’t make show of grief. We weren’t close. Where did you say it happened? Down the footpath? You won’t see me down there in a hurry, I can tell you.’